July 31: Indian national television reports on power outage (to a limited audience?!)

"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked."
Mark Twain, Following the Equator.

The enormous power cut recently seen in India, which affected perhaps 700 million people, serves to highlight the degree of the structural dependency we have built into our lives in the era of cheap energy.

Electricity is one of the most complex manifestations of our complex system and has come to be widely seen as a basic necessity. It enables many of our modern life support systems. Expectations have been raised, even in many of the slums of the world, that electricity will be available, at least some of the time. The lack of it, especially if that lack is sudden and unexpected, or prolonged, increasingly leads to social unrest.

It is instructive to contrast the extent of the dependency on electricity, and the expectations that surround it, in developing and developed economies. The way a blackout plays out in a place like India is quite different than a similar outage would be in a place where power supplies are far more reliable. The primary difference is one of resilience.

Power Generation and Infrastructure

The Indian blackout has been described as "an accident waiting to happen" by Suresh Prabhu, who ran India’s power ministry in the early 2000s. India's electricity sector faces many chronic challenges thanks to the rapid development of the country. It is highly dependent on coal for 70% of generation, and commonly experiences coal shortages:

The fuel shortage is acute when it comes to coal, which accounts for two-thirds of the country's power generation.

India has about 10 percent of the world's coal reserves but output by the near-monopoly Coal India has stagnated, importing coal is far more costly and a lack of rail capacity from ports has held up supplies. Many power plants have less than seven days' of coal stocks, a level seen as critical to continuous operation.

"Coal India has enough reserves. But evacuation (transportation) is the main problem," said a senior coal ministry official. He said Coal India had set aside $900 million to lay train tracks in the next five years but the railway ministry had not responded to the plan.

Generation is water dependent, and the delayed monsoon this year has exacerbated existing water scarcity, meaning less water for hydro power and for cooling other forms of generating capacity. Lack of cooling water could cause generation, notably nuclear plants, to be shut down. Temperatures have stayed higher than normal, increasing demand for space cooling at the same time.

The lack of rain has also increased the need for irrigation water for farming, meaning increased demand for the power to access and use groundwater. Power use by farmers is subsidized, hence there is little incentive for them to conserve. The effect on demand at times of low rainfall can therefore be considerable. Climate change is likely to accentuate the water problems in the future, as monsoons may be increasingly affected, the melting of glaciers in the Hindu Kush would also reduce surface water availability and heatwaves would increase evaporation.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is the health of decrepit distribution companies that depend on subsidies and face huge losses from low tariffs and rampant power theft. Together, they are now saddled with debt worth some $35 billion and are increasingly unable to pay for new supplies.

"Generation capacity will only get financed if the financiers feel that the generators are selling power to distributors who are financially capable of paying for it," Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said recently in defense of a government plan to bail out the mostly state-owned distribution companies.

Populist-inclined state governments have made it difficult for distributors to set cost-reflective tariffs. However, with bank loans drying up, many distributors have been forced to raise tariffs sharply over the past six months.

While India ranks sixth in the world in terms of overall electricity production and consumption, its population of 1.2 billion means that per capita levels of electricity consumption remain low at just over 500 kWh per person per year, compared to more than 2,600 kWh in China and nearly 12,000 kWh in the United States.

Reliable operation of the large interconnected grids of North America and Europe is founded on established practices of tight frequency control and all control areas sticking to their respective interchange schedules. The grid frequency normally remains within +/- 0.03 Hz of the rated frequency, and any excursion beyond that is considered alarming. Utilities deviations from their schedules are minimal, and have to be made up in kind the next day. They are therefore not priced. Adequacy of generating capacity enables maintenance of requisite spinning and cold reserves at all times, for overcoming contingencies. In a regime with such discipline, all power plants must generate power according to the schedules decided by the concerned load dispatch centres, and pit-head and nuclear power plants can steadily operate at a substantially constant MW as per their respective schedule.

The situation, on each of the above counts, is very different in India. The peak-hour consumer demand far exceeds the available generating capacity. Capacity shortage is officially stated as around 15%. Load-shedding is a daily routine except in metropolitan cities and State capitals. Rural supplies are regularly rostered commonly and restricted to 8-12 hours a day in most States. State utilities, in their anxiety or compulsion to minimize load-shedding in their area, tend to overdraw power from the larger grid. Interchange schedules go for a toss, and frequency often plunges below the stipulated lower limits. As per a recent report, the frequency was below 49.2 Hz for about 25 % of the time during August 2009. On the other hand, industries and commercial establishments need back-up diesel generators for continued operation when power supply from the grid is cut-off or is curtailed (for a few hours every day), and domestic consumers have to bank on their own battery-backed "inverters" to get the basic amenities of light and fan round the clock.

Since deviation from drawal schedules of State utilities are inevitable and substantial, and cannot be returned in kind, they are priced. Utilities pay for overdrawal, and get paid for under-drawal at a frequency-linked rate, which goes up as frequency declines and goes down as frequency rises…

…Frequency is the most crucial parameter in the operation of an A.C. system. The rated frequency in India is 50.0 Hz. While the frequency should ideally be close to the rated frequency all the time, it has been a serious problem in India. There was a time it varied from below 48.0 Hz to above 52.0 Hz, even beyond its legally permissible limit of +/- 3%, i.e. from 48.5 Hz to 51.5 Hz as per Indian Electricity Rules, 1956…Frequency fluctuations are caused by load-generation imbalances in the system, and keep happening because consumer load keeps changing.

Poor power quality control has knock-on effects on equipment operation, including large-scale generation capacity. Equipment damage can, of course, further compromise supply and aggravate the effects of chronic fuel shortages. Crucially, nuclear plants do not function well in such an environment:

Nuclear power plants are particularly susceptible to frequency fluctuations. As frequency changes, the speed of the coolant pumps changes proportionately, and the coolant flow and consequently the temperature differential across the reactor also vary. The above temperature differential is a primary signal for reactor power control, and its variation gives a command for change of reactor power even when the reactor has been operating at the optimum level. This is turn causes unnecessary fluctuations of reactor power and undesirable wear of fuel rods, etc.

Demand often exceeds supply by 10%, hence rolling blackouts are a constant feature. Losses in the transmission and distribution systems are huge – 40-50% – thanks to decrepit infrastructure and extensive power theft. The power system (as with much of society) is plagued by corruption. This leads to great popular frustration:

Citizens could take to the streets if the blackouts continue, warned Harry Dhaul, director general of the Independent Power Producers Association of India, a non-governmental organisation that campaigns for improvement of the Indian power sector: "There will obviously be some agitation in urban areas, which have become very reliant on electricity … There could be riots; there could be protests."

At the beginning of July, repeated power cuts during a spell of 40C-plus heat prompted hundreds of residents to vandalize electricity substations in the new city of Gurgaon just outside Delhi. Rioters beat up energy company officials, holding some of them hostage and blocking roads in several parts of the city.

A large minority of those in the blackout zone have never been connected to any grid – just 16.4% of the 100 million people who live in the central-eastern state of Bihar have access to electricity, compared with 96.6% in Punjab in the west.

In order to help balance supply and demand, consumers are required to inform the power distributor of the proposed load. They are supposed to apply for, and pay for, permission to connect the new device, but since this can take a long time and be relatively expensive, the rule is often not observed:

Central Electricity Supply Utility of Orissa (CESU) officers said most of the disruptions are due to damages in the electrical circuits because of undisclosed load. For adding new electrical devices, one can apply to the area junior engineer of the power distributor by paying the security deposits. If one adds an AC using 1 kilo watt power, he would have to make a security deposit of Rs 432 and so on, Sinha explained…

…CESU sources estimated that the undeclared load has gone up by around 20 per cent in the past few days. "This is because hundreds of air-conditioners and air coolers were installed by people to get respite from the scorching heat. However, very few people had actually announced these additions," said CESU spokesman Golak Bihari Sahoo.

Sprawling industries and emerging urban lifestyles in Ahmedabad enfolds in itself a dark and morbid life of scarcity, filth and deprivation. Nearly 41 per cent of people in the city live in slums.

There are 792 slums spread all across the city. Migrants from Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh who come in search of a livelihood also live here. But the majority comprises scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. A good percentage of migrants from Bengal and Bangladesh is also seen…

…"We have to pay Rs 750 for the connection and an additional Rs 250 to fix the metre box. Every month we get a bill of Rs 150-200. We cannot afford to pay more than Rs 1,000 for a connection," said Gita Rabari, a slum-dweller of Baba Ramdev Nagar of Chandloda slums in Isanpur.

A one-room slum hut next to the nahalla, the foetid, drainage canal which runs past the cremation pyres near Nizamuddin, costs about 500 rupees rent a month, usually paid to the local gangsters.

The slums around my place usually have electricity, illegal of course. Every electricity post is rigged with hundreds of wires leading down into the slum dwellings, and because of this illegal tapping (local garment shops and factories also do it) Delhi is cursed with power black-outs. Twice a day, for up to six hours at a time, in 111 degree [Fahrenheit] heat, my electricity goes. The poor suffer, while the rich in New Delhi crank up their noisy generators to charge their ceiling fans and fridges.

With nearly 25 per cent of the slums not having electricity, slum-dwellers have resorted to stealing it from those who have installed metres. There are also ‘dealers’ who illegally supply electricity to houses.

"My paan shop hardly provides me with any money. Therefore, I supply electricity to houses. I get the wire connections from an electricity metre in the neighborhood. Five to six houses can get electricity from one wire in just Rs 150," claimed Raju.

Electricity theft is also part of the problem, but simply identifying the problem as "theft"—as many do—rather than recognizing that people deserve access to electricity, minimizes the social and economic reasons that drive people to frustration to the point where they feel they have a right to steal power from the grid.

Despite massive loans, debt, and the poorest paying for the power with their land or their lives, one-third of India’s households do not have enough electricity to power a light bulb, according to last year’s census. And so they steal it. And in stealing it, they increase energy inefficiency, by often grounding the wire they have hooked up illegally to the grid in the soil, thereby losing more power.

In this June 13 file photo, an electrical linesman repairs cables in the middle of a spider web of illegal subsidiary wires around the main cables in Allahabad, India. Stealing of power is a frequent phenomenon in Indian towns. AP Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh

With such strong incentives, it is no surprise that the practice is endemic:

How can you live on a few dollars a day? Well, it helps a little if your electricity is free. For slum dwellers in Rohini, a residential district in North West Delhi, power theft is almost a way of life. There's little or no effort to hide it, and the method is simplicity itself: just find the nearest overhead power cable, sling a metal hook over it, then run a wire from the hook to the home. The result: an illegal supply of free electricity that lasts until inspectors from the local power utility stage one of their periodic raids. And when that happens, people simply all wait for a few hours until the inspectors have gone before reconnecting.

The evidence for this is there for all to see. Across a main road from the slum is a line of pylons carrying mains electricity cables. As well as the thick wires they are supposed to be supporting, most of the pylons have dense tangles of other much smaller wires sprouting off in different directions. The proliferation of connections makes the pylons look a little like over-decorated Christmas trees.

These little wires run across the road siphoning off power from the transmission lines to homes and businesses located in the slum, which is a maze of little alleyways with children and animals running around. Most households here seem to have an illegal connection to the grid. In many instances there are several unauthorized connections – and on occasion a legal one as well…

…Although Delhi has been dubbed the power theft capital of the world, the situation in other parts of India is little better. There are no hard figures, but the best estimate is that somewhere between a third and half of the country's electricity supply is unpaid for. No other country suffers revenue losses on this scale.

It is not just the very poor who do not pay. Power theft is far more extensive than that. The inability, or unwillingness, to pay for supply means that improvements to the system are very difficult to finance.

Slum dwellers' unofficial hook-ups are the most visible sign of India's power theft crisis, but there are yet bigger problems dogging the country's energy sector. Meter tampering by middle class households seeking to pay less than they should costs still more, says Sangeta Robinson, an official with local utility North Delhi Power Limited, a subsidiary of energy giant Tata Power. And yet another huge loss – albeit one which no-one can quantify – is electricity theft by industrial enterprises.

Giresh Sant, who works for an NGO called Prayas campaigning for more efficient and accountable government, says the problem is one of corruption – and a vested electoral interest in turning a blind eye. No-one likes paying their utility bills, he says, so often politicians regard laxness about revenue collection as a vote-winner. And opportunities for personal enrichment through corruption related to industrial power theft have given them, as well as civil servants and utility officials, further incentives not to rock the boat.

At least 20% of India's power is consumed by farmers' irrigation systems. Frequently they either get free power or pay low set charges that bear no relation to the amount of electricity used. The powerful farmers' lobby is hard for politicians to ignore in country where a majority of the population still makes its living from agriculture.

A tired man with a thin mustache, Seth is one of the many people fighting block-by-block to clean up the system. It’s an unenviable task. If Sisyphus had been Indian, his sentence might have been to unsnarl the boulder-sized knots of wire that hang from every electric pole.

Many Indians have a long-standing reluctance to pay for power, dating back to the era when the state controlled nearly the entire economy, including the energy sector, and securing a legal power connection could take a lifetime.

Corruption certainly has played a role in India’s power failures for decades. At every step in the supply chain, money is siphoned off, resulting in a shoddy system– from backup systems to warning systems to good cables. Currently, good cables intended for transmission get sold and shoddy materials put in their place.

It would be a herculean task to reform the power sector into anything remotely resembling what the developed world is used to.

The current prevailing theory is that the outage started with an internal failure in a power line in Agra, removing significant generating capacity from the grid. This event should have triggered an immediate order to all states on the grid to shed load, or intentionally reduce power delivery to their consumers. By the time this order was given, however, most other generators on the grid had already dropped frequency due to the load demand being greater than what they could generate. This happened as no regions shed load and the rest of the generators were struggling to cover for the lost power on the failed Agra line. Before anyone could react, the whole northern grid had collapsed.

The impact was considerable. People were trapped in the metro or stranded at stations, with electric trains unable to move and blocking the movement of diesel trains. Massive traffic jams formed in New Delhi as traffic lights went out. Electric crematoria ceased to function. Hundreds of miners were trapped underground. Water supply was heavily impacted. Some hospitals faced major difficulties in the following days:

Generators require fuel, which can be scarce during a blackout. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that at a major hospital in Gurgaon, the backup generators failed after prolonged use. This forced nurses to manually operate life-saving equipment such as ventilators for about 15 patients. "We were lucky that no lives were lost," a senior doctor said. "The generators came back up in about 20 minutes."

Among those affected by the outage was 62-year-old Pramitha Devi, who was bidding to take the metro toward Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in New Delhi after her home dialysis machine was damaged by electricity fluctuations. A doctor who identified himself as R.C. Bhargava said the hospital’s generators had not been fully refueled since the July 30 grid collapse, leaving them with about two hours of electricity for the intensive care unit. "We have to make plans to shift critical patients to other hospitals," said Bhargava.

In India, the issue is not whether or not there will be blackouts. People know that there will be, often for several hours every day. They prepare for outages and take them in stride:

When I was growing up in Delhi, we were well accustomed to daily summer power outages, euphemistically called "load shedding." These blackouts were regularly scheduled every evening and often created an atmosphere of genial neighborly fun — people out on terraces enjoying cold drinks, talking with neighbors over walls, taking walks, kids playing in the street — and they didn’t seem particularly inconvenient. But all that was another time and a far cry from the catastrophic two-day power crisis that India experienced earlier this week.

The distinction that matters is between planned and unplanned outages. Planned outages are called rolling blackouts:

A rolling blackout, also referred to as load shedding, is an intentionally engineered electrical power shutdown where electricity delivery is stopped for non-overlapping periods of time over geographical regions. Rolling blackouts are a last-resort measure used by an electric utility company to avoid a total blackout of the power system. They are usually in response to a situation where the demand for electricity exceeds the power supply capability of the network. Rolling blackouts may be localized to a specific part of the electricity network or may be more widespread and affect entire countries and continents. Rolling blackouts generally result from two causes: insufficient generation capacity or inadequate transmission infrastructure to deliver sufficient power to the area where it is needed.

Rolling blackouts are a common or even a normal daily event in many developing countries where electricity generation capacity is underfunded or infrastructure is poorly managed. Rolling blackouts in developed countries are rare because demand is accurately forecasted, adequate infrastructure investment is scheduled and networks are well managed; such events are considered an unacceptable failure of planning and can cause significant political damage to responsible governments. In well managed under-capacity systems blackouts are scheduled in advance and advertised to allow people to work around them but in most cases they happen without warning, typically whenever the transmission frequency falls below the 'safe' limit.

Unscheduled power outages are back to haunt citizens of Greater Hyderabad…

…"Central Power Distribution Company Limited (CPDCL) officials have suddenly started implementing three-hour power shutdowns without giving any schedule. We will be prepared for power cuts if the schedule is announced," A Chandrasekhar, an IT consultant and resident of Habsiguda, told TOI.

Several residents complain power cuts were beginning as early as 6 am. Office goers and students are being put to inconvenience, affecting their daily chores in the morning due to the outages.

"There was no power in my area for more than an hour in the morning. We were not prepared as the power cut starts at 9 am. With this, we could not fill our water tank and got delayed to office," ASR Murthy, an IT employee and resident of Srinagar Colony, said.

Potential solutions exist to the organizational problem, if not to the mismatch between electricity supply and demand.

"CPDCL has data of mobile phones of about 12 lakh [1.2 million] consumers in the city. They should at least inform citizens about power interruptions through SMSs on a day-to-day basis so that people can plan their chores accordingly," M Uday Kumar, a resident of Kushaiguda, said.

Indian businesses and household compensate for the inevitable power cuts with generators, fuel supplies, renewable generation and inverters, and battery banks for power storage. The elements of redundancy – alternative means to achieve the same essential function – have endowed the system with flexibility and resilience. It comes at a cost however, for the equipment and for expensive generator fuel. This provides business opportunities for those who facilitate independent generation:

Microtek, an Indian company that specializes in selling power backup inverters, claims to have 100 million "satisfied customers."

"Every year in the summer months demand peaks and there are power failures, so most middle-class families purchase an inverter. That's why we're in business," said Manoj Jain, vice president at Microtek.

To be able to afford this, one must be relatively wealthy. Otherwise, inconveniences and the discomfort of sweltering temperatures without cooling must be endured.

In the centre of Delhi, one of the world's biggest, dirtiest, noisiest cities, is an island of calm. Here, government ministers live in vast, state-owned villas; judges, generals and senior bureaucrats walk their dogs across well-watered lawns as servants scrub their government cars; top politicians confer in compounds and the wives of unimaginably wealthy industrialists hold lunch parties catered by top chefs. You live here and visit India.

Last week, India visited this island in the shape of a giant power cut.

Such outages are a daily occurrence for the rest of the population – or at least the two-thirds of India's 1.2bn inhabitants who actually have any electricity supply. But they are not for India's elite. For the latter, power guarantees power. The bureaucrats in charge of Delhi's grids switch off the supply to hospitals before they plunge the homes of top politicians into darkness. But this time the lights did go off. And so the residents of the most upmarket parts of the city – so confident of their power supplies that they do not have generators – had to sit in the fetid monsoon temperatures of 35 degrees [Celsius] like everyone else.

Impact on Development and Obstacles to Improvement

The unreliability of electricity supply has a significant impact on economic development, as it decreases productivity and increases cost substantially. In addition to supplying back up power, companies may have to arrange alternate water supplies or alternate employee transportation.

There are often equipment compromises that have to be made, and this has knock-on effects on operations. Businesses are often equipped to cope with intermittent power, but are worried about competitiveness and investment.

Work making potato chip display racks at Jayraj Kumar's factory barely paused when much of India's power grid collapsed. The backup generators kicked in automatically and the electric saws, presses and welding machines kept running, just like they do during the five-hour power cuts the factory in suburban Delhi suffers nearly every day.

India's unreliable power system has forced businesses to create a workaround electricity system of noisy, dirty diesel generators that prepared them well when the world's worst blackout hit the country Tuesday. But the trouble has also vastly increased businesses's expenses, dragged down their productivity and hampered economic growth in the country. "Running a factory is very tough here," Kumar said…

…Kumar, 56, started his business turning metal wire into display racks 23 years ago with just three employees. Now his company, The Rhino, runs a factory of 200 workers that churns out 1,500 red racks a day for clients from PepsiCo to Nestle that are ubiquitous in markets across India.

When the company opened its new factory in this Delhi suburb three years ago, "we knew that power would be a problem," he said. "From the very first day, whenever we start an office or factory we immediately think of having a decent power backup," he said.

Behind the cavernous whitewashed factory, lined with workers operating spot welding machines and kicking up sparks as they saw through metal, stands a large, green 80 megawatt generator on a brick foundation. In a corner on the ground floor is another generator rigged with a truck ignition that starts with a belch of gray smoke. Nearby, two more generators are hooked up, and, taking no chances, Kumar bought a fifth one Wednesday.

The factory runs 16 hours a day, at least five of them on generator power, he said. This backup system comes at a huge price for Kumar's business. "Generators are meant for emergencies, they aren't meant for production purposes," he said.

Each generator costs 1 million rupees ($18,000) and has to be replaced every three years. The four full-time generator operators cost him another 1.2 million rupees ($21,600) in salaries. He pays 4 million rupees ($72,000) in diesel bills. In all, he estimates the generator power costs him 10 times as much per unit as the grid power and adds 20 percent to his overall costs.

And the fluctuating voltage from the generators wreaks havoc with his equipment. The welding and grinding machines work unpredictably on generator power, vastly slowing down production and reducing the quality of his racks. He is forced to pay an extra 6 million rupees ($108,000) to repair equipment the unstable voltage damages every year. "You cannot plan your production, your commitments are gone," Kumar said.

He must use the most basic, labor intensive machines, because generator power would destroy computerized equipment. When he tempted fate by importing two 5 million rupee ($90,000) machines that printed large format ads to adorn the racks, they both stopped working within a week, he said. He can't export his products because their quality is too low, but he can't get the machines that would make them better either, he said. With reliable power, he would instantly increase his output by 30 to 40 percent, he said.

His work in China has left him jealous of the infrastructure there. Smaller countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines have surpassed India and he laughed about a one-minute power outage he once experienced in Singapore that turned into a major news story.

While India created dubious history on Tuesday with the world's largest blackout, its $100-billion software and services sector managed to keep its lights and links with clients on by drawing power from diesel gensets. But not before India's image as a premier investment destination for technology was called into question by jittery clients worried about the ability of companies to provide uninterrupted services.

"The blackout has impacted the perception of India at a country level. India's image has taken a beating," said Som Mittal, president of IT trade body Nasscom.

A number of factors have rendered increasing supply problematic. Apart from the endemic corruption that complicates every transaction and adds cost at every turn, there has also been political infighting, with the power system used as a political football:

Lack of political will coupled with successive governments’ short sightedness has cost the country dearly in terms of implementing several projects. For example, in 2008, the energy infrastructure company Reliance had proposed to build an 8 gigawatt (GW) natural gas power plant. The political party in power at the time allowed the company to acquire the land in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, for power plant construction after compensation was given to land owners and farmers. When the opposition party came into power in the next session, political rivalry triggered biases and this land was declared disputed. Reliance lost the case in Supreme Court and construction of the plant has now been shutdown. This plant could have been instrumental in reducing the daily power cuts utilities make in and around Uttar Pradesh.

The interest rate on government land loans has increased from 9 percent in 2010 to 14.5 percent in 2011. This increase in land loan interest rates has made it less feasible for private firms to invest in power plants. Higher land costs increase the amount of initial capital needed, and the impact can be seen in the form of increased electricity costs and lower returns for utilities.

India’s relations with certain neighboring countries have hindered the development of its power sector, as seen in the case of the Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline. India has considered various proposals for international pipeline connections with other countries. One such scheme is the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) Pipeline, which has been under discussion since 1994. The plan calls for a roughly 1,700-mile, 5.4-Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) pipeline to run from the South Pars fields in Iran to the Indian state of Gujarat. While Iran is keen to export its abundant natural gas resources and India is in search of ways to meet its growing energy demand, a variety of economic and political issues have delayed the project agreement. Indian officials have made it clear that any import pipeline crossing Pakistan would need to be accompanied by a security guarantee from officials in Islamabad.

India's rapid growth rate – 8% per year in recent years – leads to projections that $300 billion will need to be spent on new generating capacity and new transmission and distribution infrastructure over the next 25 years in order to meet demand. Of course, given the impact of the global financial bubble bursting, those growth projections are highly unrealistic. However, capital scarcity in a period of economic depression is likely to mean investment drying up and problems becoming far worse before there may be any chance of improvement.

Attempting to Regularize Power System Operations

One area where some tentative progress is being made towards getting supply and demand more closely aligned, at least in places, is in addressing power theft. Despite the seemingly overwhelming scope of the problem, programmes of sticks and (at least a few) carrots are showing some signs of beginning to regularize operations. The 2003 Electricity Act specifically criminalized power theft for the first time, and established enforcement mechanisms including special courts and specialist police stations dedicated to tackling the issue. Monitoring systems are beginning to be built in order to provide for auditing and accounting of supply and demand, so that the scale of the problem can be quantified.

State authorities are increasingly attempting to target the impact of load shedding on the perpetrators of power theft, rather than using the blunt instrument of citywide rolling blackouts:

The state government will rationalize load-shedding by cutting power supply to those who do not pay their bills on time. At present, an entire city has to put up with power cuts because of a few defaulters. In the new system, consumers who pay their bills regularly will get power while those who default on payments will face cuts.

In the new system, consumers will be segregated feeder-wise. Normally, each feeder supplies power to 100 to 600 consumers. Those drawing power from a feeder with a distribution and commercial loss of 33% and above will face power cuts in cities. In case of rural areas, distribution and commercial losses of 37% and above will attract power cuts. This means that only a certain set of consumers within a city or a town will face power cuts while those in neighbouring areas will be spared.

Currently load-shedding is carried out on the basis of the group (A, B,C,D,E and F) a city or a town has been placed in depending on its distribution and commercial losses. The new system, by factoring in losses at the feeder-level, will see power cuts being affected at the micro level.

The Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) has decided to implement around 11 hours of load shedding in the villages of Sathpati, Umrole and Manor, which has reported a loss of over 50 per cent of power generated…

…Sathpati village is likely to be affected the most due to the load shedding as it is from here that fishermen export their catch. The fishing jetty has around 550 boats which depend on ice for storage of fish. Fishermen fear that lack of electricity will affect the manufacture of ice and storage of fish. The daily requirement of ice for the fishermen of the village is around 350 tonnes. With the fishing activity discontinued during monsoon, a large quantity of fish caught during the past week has been kept in cold storage for export. Fishermen are worried as load shedding may lead to rotting of the fish.

MSEB officials say that there are over 5,000 consumers in the three villages but most of them enjoy zero billing. Stolen power is used by the villagers to organize night cricket matches and other sports. Festivals and marriages also largely function on stolen electricity. The electricity board has already fined seven customers for power theft and recovered Rs 57,000 from them. The load shedding, say officials, will continue till the power theft is minimized.

The idea of privatization is gaining traction, on the grounds that this may improve management and lead to greater cash flow, which could fund improvements to the system. The two largest private power companies (Tata Power and Reliance Energy) have been given control of electricity supply in the Delhi area, and claim to have limited losses through a combination of pursuing legal action, 'educating people about the merits of paying for power', and offering small financial incentives.

Through dozens of power raids every week, among other strategies, they have managed to dramatically reduce theft in Delhi. BSES, the Reliance subsidiary that handles two-thirds of Delhi’s power, has sent more than 650 people to prison and booked more than 114,000 cases in special courts that handle only electricity cases. By the end of last year, BSES…..had cut theft from around 52 percent in 2002 to 28 percent. They want to bring that down to 10 percent.

Reliance Infrastructure, the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA), and other partners have launched a project to provide improved access to safe electricity supply to around 104,000 Indian slum dwellers. The GPOBA Improved Electricity Access to Indian Slum Dwellers project aims to provide up to 26,250 new and upgraded electricity connections for residents of the Shivajinagar slum in Mumbai. About 8,000-12,000 new connections and 5,000 upgraded connections are planned in a first phase expected to be completed by 2011.

Currently, many slum households in Mumbai do not have access to safe and reliable electricity. The challenge is that there is no support beyond the regulated point of supply (the metering point). Arrangements are informal and the lack of an institutional framework to support the financing of connections for the poorest leads to bottlenecks in connection investment. The relatively high upfront costs of the connection, which are estimated to be in the region of US$105 per connection, also act as a significant constraint.

Under the GPOBA scheme, households will pay less than half the connection cost, with GPOBA providing a one-off subsidy to make up the difference. Payment of 90 percent of this subsidy will be conditional upon independent verification of working connections and of six months’ supply and billing. The connection work (wiring from the meter to the house and internal wiring) will be carried out by licensed electricity contractors chosen directly by the customers. The scheme offers a framework not just for performance-based subsidies, but also for community awareness building, training of electricity contractors, and a check on quality of service to the hutment.

"The Mumbai slum electrification scheme presents an opportunity to understand how output-based aid can be used to supply basic services in areas beyond the regulated utilities’ responsibility," explains Mustafa Zakir Hussain, GPOBA and World Bank task manager for the project. The GPOBA project, financed through a US$1.65 million grant, forms a financing window in a larger Slum Electrification and Loss Reduction program, led by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in cooperation with the International Copper Promotion Council (India) or ICPCI.

The project targets approximately 100,000 slum dwellers of the six million in Mumbai alone – over 50% of the population. At this rate, progress will not be rapid, and it will remain difficult to combat unofficial connections when legal ones are still expensive and can take months to arrange.

While government officials are trying to convince the illegal electricity suppliers to get metres provided by the municipal corporation, the slow process of getting electricity after filling up the application form puts off many.

"I had applied for electricity months back. I own a shop. They are asking us to pay Rs 3,600 to get a connection for commercial usage," said Bharat Thakore, a paan shop owner in Chandlodia slum.

"We are planning to appoint an individual from the slum itself who can take our applications in bulk and give them to the municipal corporation. This will fasten [hasten]the long awaited process of getting electricity. When we are ready for legal connections, we are being asked for more money," said Thakore.

Residents are typically not optimistic about the prospects for improvement:

Citizens of Gurgaon, often dubbed the millennium city, told NDTV that the power shortage and lack of water have been a major hit to the city.

What's more, the residents said that this isn't at all unusual for them. One male resident said on average they have 10 – 11 hour power cuts when they have to rely on generators and tankers to supply them with water. One resident said its was "hell to live" there, while another said "If you want a millennium city go to Hong Kong."

India's Power Future

India's power system problems are part of a much larger crisis of decrepit infrastructure, unable to be repaired thanks to lack of funds and lack of political will to tackle endemic corruption. Moving forward will be difficult, and, even without a looming global financial emergency, it would take decades to construct a power system recognizable in the developed world. By the time it could hypothetically have been accomplished, fuel shortages would have become far more acute than they are today, as the world would be well past the peak of the hydrocarbon age.

It seems that a modern grid serving the whole population reliably and seamlessly will remain a pipe-dream. The future of power in India is far more likely to involve something much less ambitious, but also arguably far more appropriate for an energy and capital constrained era rife with uncertainty and unrest. Given its complexity, the 'ideal' central station power grid will be difficult to maintain anywhere under such circumstances, very much including the developed world. Rather than aspiring to reach an unattainable goal, it may well be better to design a simpler and more decentralized system based on micro-grids, and designed to deliver basic needs, rather than wants. Decentralized systems may be less efficient, in that one sacrifices economies of scale, but they are also more resilient, and that will be critical.

Private power alternatives are likely to flourish to an even greater extent than they already do, at least where liquidity remains available, as power system problems become even more acute in the future. The industry is being unbundled, with generation, transmission and distribution being separated, as they have been in many places that have pursued liberalization of the industry. Generation in particular has seen increasing private investment, to the point where it accounts for about a quarter of capacity.

India’s Solar Mission aims to generate 20,000 MW of solar power and deploy 20 million solar lighting systems for rural areas by 2022. This tremendous scale-up is expected to drive down costs rapidly so as to achieve grid parity in that time frame. A key enabling policy for this is a Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO) requiring state energy providers to buy a certain percentage of their energy from renewable sources, including a carve-out for solar specifically. There are also significant opportunities for improved energy efficiency.

One interesting application of solar photovoltaics is to use solar panels to cover irrigation channels for agriculture. This not only generates a significant quantity of electricity, but also reduces evaporation from the open channel, thereby easing water shortages. The potential benefits are considerable, although this remains a large-scale, top-down, expensive and technologically complex approach, which is unlikely to be the best means for India to proceed over the longer term. (See for instance this TED talk on the ancient art of water harvesting in India for an example of more appropriate traditional technology that is far more sustainable.)

This solar panel laid on the vast stretches of agricultural channels in Gujarat generates 1 MW of electricity per KM & prevents evaporation of 1 crore [10,000,000] litres of water every year

Many argue for a system of feed-in tariffs – premium payments for renewable power fed into the grid – which have been successful in delivering so much renewable generation in various European countries, notably Germany:

Ironically, one region that did well during the power crisis in India was Jodhpur, where, after a brief interruption, the windmills kept hospitals and households powered up while the rest of the country went black. Were the World Bank to have pushed a model, such as that successfully employed in Germany and other countries, where a "feed-in tariff"—a guaranteed rate of payment for energy fed into the national grid– for renewable energy had been put in place, small farmers and others in rural areas would be able to both provide power to the grid and earn money in doing so.

But instead, they foisted on the largest democracy a neoliberal model—where unions were busted, power was privatized, people were treated like pawns on a giant chess board, while they targeted the affluent and heavy industries first for energy delivery using some of the most environmentally destructive energy resources on the planet. The assumption: energy services would eventually trickle down to the poor. Nearly two decades later, after billions in investment, one-tenth of the world sits in the dark, the planet is rapidly heating up, and the only thing trickling down to the poor is contaminated water or, if they’re lucky, enough water to keep their parched crops alive.

While wind power can be very useful, it is not a panacea. While it may have helped in the recent blackout, and clearly helps at other times, dependency on intermittent power can also contribute to the problem of unscheduled load shedding when the energy source is not available:

K. Kathirmathiyon, secretary of Coimbatore Consumer Cause, says the problem of unscheduled power cut has arisen because the State is heavily dependent on wind power during the windy season. TANGEDCO officials say that on most of the days the load shedding in an area is according to a schedule, though it is not yet announced. There is no load shedding or it is for a shorter duration when the wind energy generation goes up.

Unfortunately, India is not Germany. The existing power hierarchy and the pervasive corruption would make implementing such a system very difficult. But more significantly, feed-in tariffs around the world are very likely to be cut back or abandoned in a global financial crisis, even in the locations where they have been very successful. In fact this is already occurring, as we discussed here at TAE in The Receding Horizons of Renewable Energy. This will leave people who have borrowed money in order to build large projects without the income stream needed to service the debt incurred to do it. Trusting government promises to pay for 20 years are risky at the best of times and in the least corrupt of places.

The other objection to this approach to utilizing renewable power is that the requirement to feed into expensive and complex infrastructure greatly reduces the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) of what is already a low EROEI energy source. As with all such sources, the energy profit ratio is too low to sustain a society complex enough to produce them in the longer term. Renewable power is a misnomer, since the materials required to harvest it are not themselves renewable, and the ability to build and maintain the infrastructure depends heavily on the continued availability of high EROEI energy sources. However, it can be used to make a huge difference to people's lives, and it will make a larger difference for a longer time at much lower cost if it is implemented in such as way as to maximize the EROEI by minimizing the requirement for extraneous infrastructure.

Embracing a simpler future before being forced to do so by circumstance could allow a country like India to avoid a great deal of expense, keep to a human scale where much of the impact of corruption could perhaps be avoided and provide basic services for far more people. Unfortunately, this approach is highly unlikely. It feeds neither the demands of the wealthy for developed-world level electricity services, nor the appetite of the corruption machine for large-scale projects where funds can be spun off in the direction of the well connected. India is therefore likely to see greater attempts to improve service for those who can pay, and to remove service to those who cannot.

Some experts are more hopeful than in the past because a number of Indian officials have made politically difficult decisions in recent months to raise electricity prices. State governments in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Punjab have moved to stem losses at public utilities that had been selling power for far less than it costs them to buy it. Besides providing more money to invest in additional supply, the higher prices for consumers and businesses should also help lower demand for power.

"I think everybody has realized that there are no free lunches," said Chandan Roy, a former director at India’s largest state-owned power producer, the National Thermal Power Corporation.

India Versus Developed Country Power Systems

Power systems in developed countries do not face the obstacles of fuel shortages, supply /demand imbalance and corruption faced in India. Despite aging infrastructure, and underinvestment that will store up problems in the future, the systems presently have sufficient integrity to allow for good control over power quality parameters. Equipment is not damaged by power surges or brownouts. Electricity supply is reliable and stable. This has been the case for so long, that it is taken utterly for granted. An indicator of just how reliable power supply has become was provided when a 1994 earthquake temporarily knocked out power in Los Angeles:

Now we have so much artificial light that after a 1994 earthquake knocked out power, some concerned residents of Los Angeles called the police to report a "giant, silvery cloud" in the sky above them. It was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before.

Very few provide for back ups, as these would almost always be seen as an unnecessary expense. Private safety margins are few, hence resilience of the larger system is much reduced. Rare interruptions to supply therefore cause difficulties, and can rapidly lead to public anger. Access to however much electricity one could want, whenever one might happen to want it, and at an affordable price is seen as an entitlement, or even as a basic human right. The structural dependency on electricity supply has increased to the point where it has become a life support system in many ways. Without it, the technology traps will close very quickly. Witness the effects of a 2011 incident in California:

"Electricity was primarily a luxury when the majority of our grid was built 50, 60 years ago. Most people didn’t require computers to do their jobs every day. They didn’t need the Internet access. IPhones didn’t need to be charged, and communication was all hard-wired, so you could still make a phone call when the electricity was out."…

…Schools closed, planes were grounded for hours, traffic lights went dark and gridlock followed. People were trapped on rides and in elevators at SeaWorld and Legoland. Pumps failed at water-treatment plants, flooding San Diego Bay with more than 2.5 million gallons of raw sewage and forcing beaches along the coast to close.

What an investigating commission later called a "cascading and uncontrolled" shutdown became the most extensive power outage in California history.

This is a dangerous situation. The dependency is so much greater in western societies, that cascading system failure is a significant possibility if the grid were to experience a major disruption. Underinvestment is chronic, and this is storing up many challenges for a future when the money needed may not be available. As in India, no one wants to pay for the means to preserve the grid current capacities:

No one is taking care of the grid — the network of transmission lines, interconnectors and transformers that is essential to life as we know it; two, supply cannot keep up with demand; and three, rate-setting is a political rather than an economic process. It should not come as a shock, so to speak, that neglect, failure to prepare and playing politics with essentials should lead to disaster…

…No less than the American Society of Civil Engineers said in a report released in April that the grid could break down by 2020 unless investment in it is increased immediately by about one billion dollars a year. Why so much? Because, according to the report, more than two-thirds of the system’s transmission lines and power transformers are at least 25 years old, and 60 percent of the circuit breakers have been in use for more than 30 years.

Investment of the massive size required would require increased rates for electricity, and that simply is not going to happen in a political climate where people are not expected to have to pay for anything; not their government (no new taxes) not their wars (Iraq was "off the books") and certainly not their electricity. Despite being deregulated like many other aspects of economic life pursuant to the Reagan Revolution, electric utilities who raise their rates soon find that deregulation does not extend that far. In Maryland, when it was revealed that moving to market rates would cause Baltimore Gas and Electric to increase rates by 72 per cent, that was the end of deregulation.

In this, as in so many other areas of public life, we are like the ass starving to death because he is equidistant from two bales of hay and can’t decide which way to go. We either have to spend tons of money propping up the old system, or expend tons of effort and thought coming up with a new one. By refusing to do either, we drift faster and faster toward the precipice over which India has just tipped.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) calculated that an additional investment of $107,5 billion was needed by 2020 to keep the electrical infrastructure whole…

…The utilities walk a fine line between satisfying their customers and keeping their investors happy, with costly expenditures in infrastructure bound to hurt profitability unless public utility commissions allow rates to keep pace with investment…

…"By 2020, the cost of service interruptions will be $71,5 billion, or, if you break that down to households, $565 over that period," Andrew W. Herrmann, president of ASCE, said

As we move further into financial crisis with the bursting of the global credit bubble, it will become more and more difficult to fund infrastructure investment, and we are living on borrowed time as it is. We have already been coasting on past infrastructure investments for a long time. As India demonstrates, even truly decrepit infrastructure can function much of the time, so we are not yet at all close to risking any kind of permanent blackout scenario. However, India also demonstrates that compromised infrastructure does not deliver reliable power, and western economies have a much stronger dependency on constant power availability.

The central station model of electricity supply, with large power plants distant from demand feeding into a transmission grid, is under threat worldwide. In a capital and energy constrained environment, it will not be able to deliver what we have become accustomed to. The greater the extent of dependency, the greater we can expect the impact to be. We in the developed world, as in India, should consider looking to simpler, cheaper, more decentralized models. And we should be getting our expectations in line with what reality can hope to deliver. We are going to have to live within our means, and that will involve a much larger adjustment than most of us can currently imagine.